Sarego

At Meledo, a hamlet of Sarego, Andrea Palladio designed two villas and completed neither of them. Villa Arnaldi is from 1547 and was left unfinished; of villa Trissino, drawn twenty years later on the banks of the Guà, only the barchesse were built, the sole executed part of a project never brought to an end, and since 1996 they have been part of the UNESCO world heritage. A fragment of a house that never existed, protected as a masterpiece. The attempt went on in the eighteenth century at Monticello di Fara, where in 1714 Giovanni Battista da Porto commissioned from Francesco Muttoni, a scholar of Palladio, the villa known as La Favorita.

The people of Sarego are called seraticensi, and the reason why is a small marvel. The family that dominated the village, the da Sarego, was known at that time as Seratico; from there comes the demonym, and the name Cortesia, repeated in the dynasty generation after generation, was nothing other than the anagram of Seratico. Long before them the Romans had passed through: the land to the north west of Monticello di Fara was divided by centuriation along the via Postumia, and at Ca' Quinta the excavations of 1904 and 1927 brought to light a country villa with mosaics, marble, a heating system and a press.